Effectiveness of Interventions to Prevent Violence Against Women and Girls: A Summary of the Evidence

This short summary paper presents the evidence on the effectiveness of interventions to prevent violence against women and girls (VAWG). It is based on a rapid review of the existing evidence through a review of reviews and online searches of academic databases. Its key messages include:

While many intervention evaluations show an impact on risk factors related to violence such as attitudes, school attendance, sexual practices, alcohol use, harsh parenting, evaluations that demonstrate a significant impact on women’s experiences or men’s perpetration of VAWG were relatively rare at the time of writing.

Some areas of intervention are receiving substantial investment, but there is limited evidence of effect. For example, there is significant interest in improving school infrastructure, including WASH facilities, and bystander interventions however there is no robust evidence of impact on VAWG of these interventions.

We are yet to see an intervention that has effectively reduced both men’s perpetration and women’s experiences of violence, with evaluations tending to report a change in one but not the other.

Multi-component interventions are more effective than single- component ones in preventing VAWG.

There is emerging evidence that interventions that work with both men and women are more effective than single-sex interventions.

Strengths and Limitations of the Evidence Base

The paper says that there has been an impressive increase in the evidence base for violence prevention interventions in recent years with several rigorous impact evaluations undated or underway in low and middle income countries and showing some success in preventing VAWG. However, there are still several gaps in the evidence base:

Most rigorous evaluations of interventions to prevent VAWG are from High Income Countries (HICs) and there has been little testing of how these programmes might be adapted or applied in Low and Middle Income Countries (LMICs).